Moving Figures

Sunday, November 25, was a day of drawing moving figures with Greer Ralston.


The brief.

Greer started by getting the model, Clare, to skate around the room, stopping briefly for a few second for us to draw her.
She then did a half hour pose, dressed, sitting on a chair, which was followed by more quick poses of her wandering around the room, nude, with her dressing gown.
More life drawing, five minutes them one minute, followed by her moving. One more half hour pose and then back to skating round the room.
The last pose, with roller skates, we had one minute and then we had to move to the easel on our right and had one minute to draw on the other person's drawing. This went on for ten minutes, continually moving to the easel on the right, until every drawing was a combination of the ten of us.

By the end of the day I had 18 pages of lining paper, aprox. A1 size with multiple drawings in pastel, ink, and charcoal.

The first few sketches of Clare as she skated around the room. Sometimes she would stop for less than a minute and sometimes she was stationary for as long as a minute.

I started by covering the paper roughly with charcoal so as to get rid of the whiteness.

The most important thing I found was to get the energy of her movements and as it was impossible to get enough information down, to to for the obvious indications like the helmet, angle of legs ( shown by the knee pads) and the straps on her tee shirt.
She was wearing purple tights, black shorts, black tee shirt, blue and black striped socks and the skates' wheels were acid green with a pink strip down the sides.  I did not have time to get all the colours in but intend to do a painting based on these drawings.

There were so many drawings that there was not time to change paper and so I drew on the same page. This added to the sense of movement and energy.

This was twenty minute pose to give us time to settle back into drawing more slowly.















These life drawings were done as Claire moved across the room. Again, no time to change paper or get any detail. One minute or less was just enough time to give some indication of where the centre of balance was and no more.
I tried to prepare the paper with mid tone pastel ( sketches on right) but did not have time before Claire was moving across the room.

Most of the sketches were done with charcoal except the lower one which was done with a brush and ink over paper prepared with charcoal.

Clare then brought her dressing gown and did a few two minute poses in between walking round the room.  Sketch on the right was nearly five minutes.



































The lower pose was twenty minutes and I struggled to get the composition to work as well as the anatomy. The sketch on the right was also longer and very difficult to get the angle she was while leaning on the upturned table. After doing so much drawing at speed it was quite hard to change gear mentally.
This was Greer's intention and to change the length of all poses in order to challenge the ability to change gear.

Clare was back in her skating gear and rushing around the room and the last drawing was of her taking off her skates.

The last drawing was a combined effort by all the class. After one minute we had to go to the easel on the right and draw on the other person's drawing. After doing this ten times, each drawing had been drawn by all of us.














The experience was amazing as I found myself having to think so fast in order to get as much down as possible to indicate the movement. There was no time to think, get paper on the drawing board or decide about what medium. Just grab what came to hand and go for it!